Azul Bleu

Overview

Azul Bleu names a color in its two languages, a same physical experience that is linguistically modified by the cultural and the historical. The question remains how the formal and the phenomenological are able to permeate the cultural and the human.

Javier Toro Blum crosses his work and French culture, he takes as a starting point for his exhibition Azul Bleu a dialogue between "two blues": the color IKB (International Klein Blue) invented and patented by the French artist Yves Klein (1928 - 1962) and the luminous blue of his own works. The latter is the product of research he has been developing since 2015 around the interactions between light and dark, through filters, materials and certain colors that come close to darkness in the electromagnetic spectrum. This quest has led the artist to produce a large part of his work using glass and filters of a very deep blue which, without interior light, borders on black.

Recently, the French paint manufacturing company Ressource, in collaboration with the Yves Klein archives, developed a commercial paint using the IKB. This painting covers the walls of the gallery with an opaque tone whose velvety texture contrasts with the liveliness of the luminous works. This project is not only a formal proposal but also a desire to put various artistic proposals in dialogue and above all to intertwine French culture with the work of the artist as well as his research related to color, which evokes the phenomena astronomical in an imaginary connection with the specular and the primitive.

Works

Born in 1983 in Santiago, Chile, Javier Toro Blum studied psychology and Fine Arts at the PontificiaUniversidad Católica de Chile and he holds a MA in Sculpture from The Royal College of Art, London.His work focuses on visual perception, phenomenology of light, darkness and space, and its subsequentemotional and psychological implications on the viewer. With particular interest in architecture, specificallyin those spaces where artworks have the capacity of mediate perception. This opens to the question ofhow a body of work - that is primarily formal and phenomenological - is able to permeate the culturalsphere. Consequently, the artwork allows a triangulation between space, viewer and the piece itself.

Javier work is present in the collections of the Royal College of Art, Princeton University, Museo de ArteModerno de Chiloé, White Elephant Bibliothek, Consejo para la Transparencia del Gobierno de Chile,Fundación Ca.Sa and Fundación Engel, as well as in private collections in Chile, Germany, France, UnitedStates, Spain, England, Mexico and Perú.